From a busy opening day at Mission-K in Kalkar, Torsten Kriening welcomes Tom Segert, CEO and co-founder of Berlin Space Technologies, into the Space Café studio for a candid conversation about the shift reshaping Germany’s space sector.
Segert has attended Mission-K since its first edition and offers a warm assessment of how it has evolved. The spirit, he says, has not changed; what has changed is the outreach, with attendance roughly tripling and networking becoming far easier. He also notes that the first edition predated the German defence minister’s landmark announcement — a significant marker of how much has shifted since.
The heart of the discussion is dual use. Space, Segert argues, has always been dual use in nature, and Europe maintained something of an illusion that it was purely civilian. Today, external pressure on European societies has made the reality unavoidable: society depends on space assets both to function and to defend itself, and adversaries understand that attacking those assets attacks both at once. The resulting shift toward defence is prompting active discussion across society and within companies, including BST itself. Ten years ago, he admits, defence business would never have crossed their minds; the company was focused on exports, without institutional programmes of any kind. Today he frames engagement as a civic duty — for individuals and companies alike — to consider what they can contribute to the defence of their nation and way of life, while acknowledging the genuine moral and strategic complexity that comes with it for a workforce of around 110 people drawn from many nations.
Asked how smaller companies cope with the demands of classified work, security clearances and the heavyweight processes established players have long since absorbed, Segert offers the conversation’s most pointed observation: none of the small companies has yet received a defence contract. Referring to a recent open letter signed by a group of German space companies, he argues that Germany cannot afford to ignore these firms given its ambitions, but notes the underlying obstacle — clearances and processes are prerequisites for a contract, yet in practice can only be obtained once a contract exists. A chicken-and-egg problem, as he puts it, that remains unsolved and affects everyone.
His takeaway from the event is the value of formats that bring users together with those providing solutions — and the chance to understand what the defence community will require, and to communicate that back into his own company.
